A Templar
by Chidi
Summary: This is the secret history of Cullen and the Warden.


I knew this day would come. Not that I really, truly believed in fate like some. A man makes his own way. He makes the world what it will become.

I would have killed her, as certain as anyone can be. I would have let the sword fall through the sinew of her neck as she leaned down after the Harrowing. Would she be smiling then? I've already forgotten her eyes now. Only that she had held a smile in her face. Maybe it was just a smirk, mocking me, mocking the world.

It wasn't just her friend the wilds witch, but her. I told her she shouldn't read those books about blood magic, but never tell a mage to be sated in a cage.

What I thought I loved: duty, truth, the life in her eyes...was all a dream. I found out soon enough. We had our moments of innocence, stolen like cream and ripe berries she brought to me one time. The fumbling of words, then hands soon followed. Her mouth was rich, red like those berries, yes, had the same tang of cinnamon. Too much, and you all you is cry. I did, the way a boy does for things he knew before he becomes a man. Was I innocent, truly? Not in my head. The thoughts I had of her would make the Maker blush. We were the same in our passion.

Mages don't get a chance to be in love. Templars can at least marry, but mages must always just grab at whatever moment they can. I saw Angers grab at whoever he could, Jowan, and they both betrayed in their own ways: Anders went off to Kirkwall and blew up the chantry, Jowan lied to her to used forbidden arts to free himself. Mages are not known for their stability or their loyalty. It is because when you are that shunned, you tend to turn out incomplete, evil , some would say. I certainly called it so. They don't get to trust the templars who might have to kill them at some point, not their fellows because the moment they form trust and attachment, that person may may die or become Tranquil, or get sent to another Circle.

That is how I kept denying. I never believed that I meant anything to her beyond a moment of comfort, to play at something real. I saw a loyalty in her that was unexpected and disarming. She wanted to be loved. So much. Anyone with eyes could see that.

A hard growing in the Circle for mages and those who watched. I watched her failures, her successes, great and small. I wanted to know all, even when the knowledge was painful. No one looked at her as a babe and said she had a destiny. She was Dalish, but did not have the tattoos because she was taken so young. For some, she was just another elven upstart. That is the first time I remember someone talking about her at all. She seemed obliging to her teachers and could be kind, but there was also something ruthless in her when she was pressed. Strong-willed, she could be rebellious at things she thought were false. This riled feathers, as you can imagine. There was something magnetic too once she came of age. One day she went from being a tom boy with skinned knees to a woman grown, a well-made woman at that. Boys, everybody, followed at her heels everywhere she went. They cameb whie she wa reading or practicing spells just to watch her hands move with precision to turn the page, call lighting from the sky. At first, she didn't know what to do, but then she figured that game out.

Despite disappointment after disappointment, she kept that smile, kept her innocence of heart, the only thing she could keep in the Circle.

But the Circle was not made for hearts like hers.

Or mine. I am not good at inaction. When things happen, I must act. Templar, mage, I will not abide injustice in any form. That is why rules are there. Templars follow orders or make them. If that was the direction of my life, then I had to make the best of it. I followed every rule, tried to forget the lad that came to the tower holding a piece of my former life, a piece my family gave me long ago. Templars aren't supposed to keep relics of their old lives, yet I broke that basic rule, one of many I would come to break.

This was always the source of all the great crossroads of my life: accepting my lot as a Templar, or trying to raise my head, make my own way in the world. I yearned as much for freedom as any mage.

Each step she took shook the very foundations of my life. What was duty and honor when you find yourself face-to- face with a trebuchet? You avoid it, or die beneath its onslaught. She held death in her, ready to summon at her will, or despite her will if a demon got hold of her...Maker forbid.

Mages are cursed. That i why they must be chained. That was what we were taught, but such things brought me to lay hands upon the most fair thing in my sad, secret life. It was Harrowing fr both of us. I tried to keep thinking of my duty as she walked in the fade. To my eyes, she slept, but this was no dream she stepped into. It was a test. If she succumbed to the whispers of demons, I'd have to kill her.

But I had kissed her. She had turned me from a boy into a man.

I had heard Templars brag, realized soon on that they probably gossiped more than they actually did anything with the mages. But I thought I was a better man in thought and deed. Denial is easy when you are certain of everything. I was certain in my faith, my calling, my sword. It was so easy to refuse what seemed to be vice. That is what 'better men' do, yes? They don't use those they are sworn to protect. But I was the one in need of armor around her.

She made me feel naked, yes, every single day. I'd try to cover myself, stutter whatever words I could conjure as some semblance of a shield between us.

She just refused to be daunted, kept feeding me whatever she had stolen. Mages have little except their power, but she'd sneak me cookies or a plum, a page filled with her thoughts in that hurried, angled hand.

Why are you here, Cullen? You could do anything...

It is The M-m-makers work. The hardest work.

The dirty work, you mean. I'm sorry. Please don't walk away. I don't think I can take it if you leave again.

I turned when I should have run away.

I count the days until I see you.

A tear falls from her eye.

You catch it you taste it. Her taste fills you until you forget what is you or her.

What of my duty to the Maker's world, of which she was a part, just as much as me?

It is good that she survived her test. I don't now if I have survived mine.

For some reason, I was the only Templar who survived the touch of Uldred's terror. I saw all my brother and sisters fall.

The blood fiends came to me in her shape. In dreams is where they first came, and it was always her I saw: above, below me, teasing, threatening me. I lost count of the dreams. Then, when they were summoned, the demons came to stand before me. They tried every one of my sins against me.

The one that I nearly succumbed to was the fantasy I had entertained of running away, of confronting the Templars with my intention to get permission to marry her. A templar marring a Dalish mage! Ridiculous, but that was the one temptation I was under when the Wardens found me.

It was the memories, the truth of her that kept me safe from the demons. I knew that she had loved me, and any dream was little next to that, next to her.

Damn her for leaving, right after the Harrowing without so much as a goodbye. She was the cause of all my woes, her and her bleeding heart of bone. She left the Circle when it needed her the most. She made me believe in her, made me love her, and discarded me in a moment. The First Enchanter told me later how she had been his agent the whole time, spying on her Jowan. How could I trust her when she came back a Warden? The love she had sworn about had to be a lie. I had seen other men fall for it, but I thought I was better than that...

Damn her for coming back like that, when I was on my knees, so close to breaking, the fantasy still vivid in my mind.

I had but not broken yet. If demons and blood magic couldn't kill me, did this girl think that she could control me?

She gave me her body, but her soul? Maker knows. When she brought the future king, who clearly pawed her for all to see, she didn't even have the gall to keep herself checked.

Still, I can't grieve over-much. Her perfume was tangled in my hair when the other boy playing templar was making eyes at my...what was she to me then? She left! She must have hate me, the Circle, maybe the Maker too.

I glared at this bastard, this buffoon. I couldn't fathom him holding her the way I had.

Even after killing Uldred, I wanted to hate every mage that reminded me of her. Her too!

So I told her to just destroy the Circle once Uldred was dead, just in case any abominations still lingered.

She said, Go fuck yourself, Templar!

Then she ran to her old bedroom at the apprentice dormitory, a place I knew well. It was the last place we had been together...

My feet brought me there before I could stop them. Angry at these traitor feet, I kicked the door off its broken hinges.

She had betrayed me, but by the end, the anger burned itself out, and I wanted comfort amid the ruin of our what had been our life together. But I couldn't understand that. I was a brash, troubled by the horrors I had witnessed.

She saw that something, everything had changed.

Cullen?

She was looking at her own reflection in a mirror, wiping bloodstains from her Circle robes, half clothed. Just like the demons had been.

Cullen?

She put a hand out toward my face, but I knocked it away.

What do you want me to say?

Say that you have wronged me.

You're the one wanting to kill mages. She spat.

Then do it, she said raising a dagger I didn't know she had concealed on her robe.

Just try, Templar. Wardens learn how to defend themselves in every way.

She threw the dagger away as quickly as she had brought it out.

There's a rebellion and a Blight. I don't time to waste on fuckers like you marching into my room.

I loved you. And you couldn't manage to say goodbye?

She laughed.

All this is because I didn't stop while Jowan was in the middle of doing blood magic to go over and say 'Bye Cullen'? If I thought about it, which I did, you were too far away, and it would have been in front of Duncan and Irving, Gregoir, everybody. We had to be secret Cullen. In was in no place to make demands, or to to put you in jeopardy, which would have happened if I went and kissed you the way I wanted to.

Then prove it.

I fucked her there: full of hated, jealousy.

I said she should have let me die rather than see her again.

She might be a Warden and seen terrors I can only imagine, but the look on her face was despondent, heartbroken like I had never seen.

It seems her experiences hadn't taken her heart, only made it grow stronger, more fierce.

She went her way into the world, and I went back to my dusky room, my duty. But I found no rest, no peace after the Tower fell. After my love was gone.

Her touch willed it. I was on my knees, always on my knees for her. She might have been a mage, elf, girl, a nobody, worse, a bomb that might go off, but she never donned these identities with me. For the whole bloody world, she just was Somebody biding her time until she found some way to lead them from shadow to light, much like a fire.

When she flashed at me, when I was young, I just wanted to believe in her absolutely, like the holy fire of The Maker's Bride. I soon found the world does not hold true to absolutes. I wanted to be a good man, a good Templar, I wanted to be good to her absolutely.

Even Andraste died of too much flame.

She gathered armies, and I began the slow work of rebuilding the Tower.

So I made excuses when the mages that survived were summoned to Redcliff Castle. I followed, of course, did my duty. And I watched, I waited for her the way she had waited for me how many, many times. See, mages always had to cringe or curtsy to their keepers. When she saw me standing there, surrounded by the her former fellows, I bowed low to her for the first time. I wanted everyone, mage and Templar to see that I had been wrong.

Though I had tried to hurt her, she still burned a hole in me.

She was all I thought about, dreamed about. I'd let her consume me, yes.

She saw. She knew. She returned my salute with one of her own. Not surprising, that. The Warden was a general and mistress to a king now, one who sparkled at bit too much in his golden plate as they passed by in formal procession and several spontaneous cheers. Now, everyone saw Somebody when they gazed at her.

She was their captain, their leader, whatever they needed her to be. It is always hard to be the one that everyone looks to. She was adept at fitting herself to others people's needs, something I still didn't quite understand then.

So, I, the evil, evil Templar never expected to see her the Circle mage, the Hero of Fereldan again.

When she came to my door that evening, she didn't knock. Templars get their own quarters, and I was the only one there. All the others had died at the Tower, as you know, as everyone knows.

She had learned how to be silent in the Circle. The door opened almost without a sound. And there she was. Like magic. She wore Circle robes no more, but ceremonial armor and circlet, rings of power, a cloak as soft as shadow itself.

You're a fool, Templar, she growled.

I nodded, fully expecting her rage. Accepting it. It was right after what I had said and done to her.

She lifted her hand, as if to strike. I did not flinch from it. Instead, I thought of all the times men had hurt women, or Templars had hurt mages, or humans hurt elves. I felt chagrined even though she said nothing else.

My passivity seemed to confirm something in her mind. Her voice suddenly became gentle.

I am sorry that I didn't come to the Tower sooner, Cullen. I would never have let those monstrosities touch you. My only comfort is that killed them all with my own hands.

She held them outward, clenched.

I kept my eyes away from her. Do not trouble yourself, Warden for my sake. You have darkspawn to kill.

True.

And an army.

Yes.

And the King.

She closed her eyes.

I felt that the woirds had stung somehow, so it made me bold.

The boy. How many times you fucked, Warden? If you tell him the same lies you told me, I'm guessing it's fairly often.

You.. judging my life, Cullen? I fell for the oldest trick in the book, the mage/templar cliche. But you were never a Templar to me. You were just Cullen, and you were the first one I could every, truly say that I loved. And I couldn't say goodbye...That was never my intent. All I have every tried to do is reach out toward you, but you kept pulling away. I might have been the one to leave the Tower, but you have left me in a hundred ways before. It was the fate of being what we were where we were.

But I never lied to you, Cullen. Ever.

If you love him, then none of it matters, ever mattered.

Should I have died in the Tower?I wasn't given a choice. I am a mage. At least with the Wardens, the leash is one I've chosen. You don't have any idea what that's like!

Templars are as imprisoned as the mages.

Always, it cones to your duty to your good and noble order. Fine, you have your duty, as I have mine. When is your duty to judge my life?

When you break my heart every time, I whispered.

Poor Cullen, oh yes, it it only you who ever feels anything.

I don't now what you feel. I doubt anyone really does.

Her eyes narrowed, Am I so cold?

I had to looked out the window to avoid her gaze, I believed every word you said to me. Just as I am sure he believes that he is the one for you. That he would do anything in this world for you. Maker help the fool. Go to him, Warden!

I turned around beat my fist into my hand, Get out a hundred times!

The Hero was on on her knees, a wounded, haunted look in her eyes, eyes that flared brightly against the darkness outside.

I couldn't speak.

Cullen... I can't fight with you anymore. Just say my name again, like you used to.

Her hands brushed against mine.

I closed my eyes, shook my head.

No! You never loved anything except your lies!

My words were so harsh, they made me cringe, but they were what I felt. I hadn't realized how deep this anger, this feeling, went. I crossed my atms, held them against me. It had worked with demons...

The she pulled me by my chin, kissed me. Maker, she kissed me.

She only broke our embrace to speak, her lips and breath warm against my forehead, You know better than that. How did I survive all this time? I thought of you. You're the only thing I've ever wanted. Don't ever forget it! Hear me?

As I ran my hands thorough her dark hair, I realized for the first time just how much she had suffered and done for me. She was always saving me, everyday from my stubbornness and my righteousness. She'd kill, she'd die for me, I knew that now.

I was holding her the way I had always imagined. No demon voice could speak like hers, but she was the source of all my desire, my sin, according to the chant. It should have felt wrong, but Sweet Maker, waking with her was the best moment I could ever remember. I let her have me truly this time, soul and body.I worshiped every part of her. She wasn't evil, and she was mine, truly mine.

A part of me died when she left that room.

She knew the spells to make men quiver. The ones of the heart are as brutal as those of blood.

When I heard others speak of what happened, I heard of her sacrifice, and wept truly for her, the lines and color gone from her cheek, the hard bed of earth that her broken body fell into instead of mine. Her funeral seemed blurry because she was long gone from us.

The fool!

I would have caught her! I would have saved her! We both do the hard thing every time. That's why she said before she died,

You're staying in Red Cliff, just in case.

I refused to let her finish, screamed until the guards came. It took a patrol to subdue me.

Before they led me away, she leaned in close, whispered just to me.

You'll survive even me. You must, my love.

Her last kiss was from the talon of a corrupted god. She is cold now. So cold.

But, I keep this just for me, to warm me sometimes: her mouth was made to kiss mine.

I saw the boy-king's tears during her funeral rites. They all cried. I had no more tears left in me. But they should cry. They failed their duty. They killed her as much as any Archdemon.

She seemed so small without her fire she carried inside. Could that small body have really contained such a will? ...Questions without an answer from Andraste or the Maker, not for this broken Templar.

She died.

After the grief, I came to myself in time. I heard another tale of The Hero of Ferelden. When Flemeth's daughter came from the sky to ask her if she would make a sacrifice of skin to save her life, the Hero refused, not because of her willingness to die. She refused because she said her magic was just as great as Morrigan's. That wasn't what the Apostate expected. The Hero sent the witch on her way.

She cut the tip of her thumbs and cried. And her lover heard, and he came to her one last time. The Hero of Ferelden was with child...

I close my eyes, but I still see her.

She stands before the Archdemon, puts her hair behind her ears, the ones that had let me trace with my thumbs, the points, then the hollow. I loved her throat, the music of her pulse quickening mine. I see her look up at the dread dragon of old, the first thing she looks at with true fear, dread. She knows she is going to die, yet she steps, madly, toward her death, breathing fire enough to kill a dragon. That is what I most admire, will remember until I die.

I'll play the hero now and then, but you and I know I must, sweet Maker, I must keep running to Kirkwall and Orlais, hoping to save the day, hoping to save the world that failed her.


End file.
